Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As I have indicated, the Greens will not be supporting this alteration to the hours of meeting and routine of business. The issue, apart from anything else, is that normally you would not change the hours on a Thursday, given members of parliament will have made decisions about where else they might be intending to be on Friday, without giving notice of that or indicating why it is urgent. It is absolutely applicable that there should be a request to change the hours of meeting and routine of business if a matter has come before the parliament which requires urgent consideration. If it is urgent then it is reasonable that the parliament be asked to change its normal way of business—which is, of course, that on Thursday we would rise at the end of a sitting week.

Now the government, with the coalition, has changed that and have done so by arguing that there is some urgency. But we have not heard a single argument from anyone as to what is urgent about bringing this matter to a decision and vote tomorrow; nor have we had any explanation for this extraordinarily unprecedented business of bringing a bill on in both houses at the same time, in the same week, to get it off the agenda. That is clearly a political strategy. Without any notice that this was going to occur, we are told today that the sitting hours have changed and we will sit here as long as it takes tomorrow night; there will be divisions and votes until whatever time it takes. There is not the courtesy from the government or the coalition to tell us why it is so urgent, other than that it is urgent to satisfy the political agenda of both the government and the coalition. They will try to get this vote in both houses of parliament in the same week so as to get it off the political agenda, as I indicated before.

It is rude to the parliament and the people campaigning on this issue around the country that there has been no explanation as to why this is in the Prime Minister's interests—other than that, as we have heard, it is in the interests of the Australian Christian Lobby and Jim Wallace in particular to have this matter dealt with and voted on. As I indicated when I spoke on this matter, it was in fact that particular individual who invited Joe de Bruyn from the executive of the ALP to speak to him last year in order to outline a strategy to derail the majority opinion in the Labor Party. It is an extraordinary thing that someone who is on the executive of the Labor Party would work with someone outside the Labor Party to derail 80 per cent of the people in the Labor Party—which is the estimate that was made at the time—by using the Prime Minister in the way that he outlined seven weeks before the national ALP conference. That is exactly what has occurred.

Interestingly, on the vote in the lower house: you have, for example, Kevin Rudd, who was going out of his way to woo the Rainbow Labor group before the 2007 election—he went out of his way to woo them with support of marriage equality—but who now turns around and votes against it in the House of Representatives. We have had a similar outcome from Malcolm Turnbull, the member for Wentworth, who at least had the courage to come out and say that he supports marriage equality but will vote against it because he is not allowed a conscience vote. The decision of the Leader of the Opposition not to permit a conscience vote goes to the heart of cowardice as well because essentially it means that he wants to give members of his party political cover behind a suggestion that they not change the position they went to the last election with and will not be allowed to say what they think. So we have those four contenders for the leadership—Prime Minister Gillard and Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, the Leader of the Opposition, and Malcolm Turnbull—all voting against marriage equality when two, if not three, of those people support marriage equality. Is it any wonder that the community is so cynical about the political process when members of parliament tell the electorate they believe in one thing and then vote in another way because they want to get political outcomes?